The eighties were halcyon days for Mossad’s great African safari. As well as playing off the Chinese against the Russians, it made matters difficult for the CIA, MI6, and other European intelligence agencies operating on the continent. Whenever one threatened Mossad’s own position, Mossad exposed its activities. In Kenya an MI6 agent was blown. In Zaire, a French network was wrecked. In Tanzania a German intelligence operation was hurriedly aborted after being uncovered by Mossad through a tip to a local reporter.
When terrorist leader Abu Nidal—who had masterminded the assassination of Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, on June 3, 1982, outside London’s Dorchester Hotel—tried to seek shelter in Sudan, Mossad promised the regime Israel would pay one million U.S. dollars for his capture, dead or alive. In the end Nidal fled to the safety of Baghdad.
In a dozen countries, Mossad exploited newfound African nationalism. Among agents who had served in several of those countries was Yaakov Cohen, who would recall: “We gave them an intelligence capability to remain on top of the opposition. In countries like Nigeria, tribal rivalries had led to civil war. Our policy was to work with anyone who would work with us. That enabled us to know everything that was happening in a country. The slightest mood change which could affect Israel was reported back.”
Before going to Africa, Cohen had distinguished himself in undercover missions in Egypt and elsewhere. As part of his disguise, Mossad had changed Cohen’s physical appearance by arranging for a plastic surgeon to alter his distinctive ethnic feature—his nose. When he returned from the hospital, his own wife barely recognized Cohen and his new nose.
On New Year’s Day, 1984, Nahum Admoni’s daily intelligence summary contained news of a coup d’état in Nigeria. A military cabal led by Major General Muhammad Buhari had seized power. Prime Minister Shamir’s first question was to ask what effect this would have on Israel’s oil supplies. No one knew. Throughout the day, urgent efforts were unsuccessfully made to establish contact with the new regime.
On his second day in office, Buhari issued a list of former members of the government accused of a variety of crimes. At its top was Umaru Dikko, the ousted transport minister, charged with embezzling several million U.S. dollars in oil profits from the government treasury. Dikko had fled the country and, despite strenuous efforts to find him, had vanished.
Admoni saw his opening. Traveling on a Canadian passport—another Mossad travel document of choice for undercover missions—he flew to the Nigerian capital, Lagos. Buhari received him late at night. The general listened as Admoni delivered an offer that had the full approval of Rabin. In return for a guarantee of no interruption in oil supplies, Mossad would find Dikko and return him to Nigeria. Buhari had a question: Would Mossad also be able to locate where Dikko had hidden the embezzled money? Admoni said the cash was almost certainly in numbered Swiss bank accounts and would be virtually impossible to trace unless Dikko volunteered to reveal its whereabouts. Buhari smiled for the first time. Once Dikko was back in Nigeria, there would be no problem getting him to talk. Buhari had a final question: Would Mossad agree to work with Nigeria’s own security service and, once Dikko was found, take no credit for his capture? Admoni agreed. There were no kudos to be gained for Mossad in an operation that should be simple enough.
Rafi Eitan’s “survivor spies” were mobilized throughout Europe. Katsas were sent to trawl from Spain to Sweden. Sayanim in a dozen countries were alerted: doctors were told to be on the lookout in case Dikko needed medical attention or even consulted a plastic surgeon to change his appearance; hotel concierges at Dikko’s old playgrounds in St.-Moritz and Monte Carlo watched for him. Clerks at car rental agencies from Madrid to Munich were instructed to report if he hired a car; airline agents were asked to call in if he bought a ticket. Sayanim working for all the credit card companies were asked to watch if he used his cards. Waiters memorized Dikko’s description, tailors his measurements, and shirtmakers his collar size. Shoemakers from Rome to Paris were given details of Dikko’s size-twelve fitting for the customized shoes he wore. In London, Robert Maxwell was asked to probe his high-level contacts among African diplomats in London for any whisper of where Dikko had gone. Like everyone else, he drew a blank.
Nevertheless, Admoni decided that Dikko was hiding out in London—the city had become a haven for Nigerian opponents of the new regime—and he moved his ablest katsas to the city. With them came agents from Nigerian security led by Major Muhammad Yusufu. They rented an apartment in the city’s Cromwell Road. The katsas chose hotels catering to tourists from Africa.
Working separately, the two groups moved among London’s sizable Nigerian community. Yusufu’s men posed as refugees from the new regime, the katsas as sympathetic to black Africans’ aspirations to overthrow the regime in South Africa. Gradually they narrowed down the search to West London, to the area around Hyde Park where many wealthy Nigerians lived in exile. They began to comb electoral registers freely available in the area’s town halls. Each time they drew a blank.
Then, seven months to the day after Dikko had fled from Lagos, he surfaced. On June 30, 1984, a katsa driving down Queensway, a busy thoroughfare off Bayswater Road, spotted a man who fitted the description of Umaru Dikko. He looked older and thinner but there was no mistaking the broad face and the coal black eyes that did not give the katsa’s car a second glance.
Spotting a parking place, the katsa set off on foot to tail Dikko to a house in nearby Dorchester Terrace. Admoni was immediately informed. He ordered the only step to be taken for the moment was full-time surveillance of the house. For the first three days of July 1984, two operatives maintained continuous surveillance on Dikko. Meantime the Nigerians used their embassy as a base to prepare a kidnap operation closely modeled on the one Rafi Eitan had used to snatch Adolf Eichmann.
Unusually, a key role had been assigned to an outsider, a much respected doctor, Levi-Arie Shapiro, a consultant anesthetist and director of the intensive care unit at Hasharon Hospital in Tel Aviv. He had been recruited by Alexander Barak, a katsa who had appealed to the doctor’s patriotism. The doctor agreed to travel to London and spend the thousand dollars Barak had given him to pay for medical equipment, which included anesthetics and an endotracheal tube. He would receive further instructions in London. Shapiro refused to accept a fee for his services, saying he was proud to serve Israel. Another katsa, Felix Abithol, had arrived in London on a flight from Amsterdam on July 2. He checked into the Russell Square Hotel. His first instruction to the head of the Nigerian team, Major Yusufu, was to rent a transit van. One of Yusufu’s men chose one that was a bright canary yellow color. That may well have been the moment the plan started to unravel.
Late in the evening of July 3, a Nigerian Airways 707 freighter landed at Stansted Airport, thirty miles northeast of London. It had flown from Lagos empty. The pilot informed the airport authorities he had come to collect diplomatic baggage from the London embassy. Traveling with the aircrew were several Nigerian security men who openly identified themselves and said they were there to protect the baggage. Their presence was reported to Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. There had been several claims in the past month that the Lagos military regime was threatening exiles in London. The security men were told they must not leave the airport. Apart from visits to the terminal coffee shop, they remained on board the aircraft.
Around midmorning the next day, the canary yellow van drove out of a garage in Notting Hill Gate that had been rented by one of the Nigerians. At the wheel was Yusufu. In the back squatted Dr. Shapiro beside a crate. Crouching with him were Barak and Abithol. At noon out at Stansted, the 707 captain filed a departure time for Lagos of three o’clock that afternoon. The flight manifest listed the cargo as two crates of “documentation” for the Ministry of External Affairs in Lagos. The paperwork claimed diplomatic immunity for both containers.
Shortly before noon, the van drove through traffic and parked outside the house in Dorchester Terrace. Soon afterward, Umaru
Dikko emerged on his way to meet a friend for lunch at a nearby restaurant. Watching from a window was his private secretary, Elizabeth Hayes. As she turned away, the back door of the van burst open and “two dark-skinned men grabbed Mr. Dikko and forced him into the back of the van. He just managed to scream something before they jumped in after him and the van was driven away at high speed.”
Recovering, the secretary dialed emergency—999. Within minutes police were on the scene, closely followed by Commander William Hucklesby of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Squad. He suspected what had happened. Every port and airport was alerted. For Hucklesby, the situation had its own special difficulties. If Dikko had been kidnapped by the Nigerian regime, that could present tricky political questions. The Foreign Office was alerted, as was Downing Street. Hucklesby was ordered to take what action he thought appropriate.
Shortly before 3:00 P.M. the van arrived at Stansted’s freight terminal. Yusufu waved a Nigerian diplomatic passport at airport customs officers. They watched the two crates being loaded on board the aircraft. One of the officers, Charles Morrow, would recall: “There was something about one of the containers that was just not right. Then I heard noise coming from one. I thought, sod this. Diplomatic immunity or not, I needed to see inside.”
The cases were taken off the plane and brought to a hangar despite Yusufu’s furious protest that they were protected by diplomatic privilege. In the first crate, Umaru Dikko was discovered tied and unconscious from an anesthetic. Sitting beside him was Dr. Shapiro, a syringe in his hand ready to increase Dikko’s drug intake. There was an endotracheal tube in Dikko’s throat to stop him from choking on his own vomit. In the other container crouched Barak and Abithol.
At their trial, both agents stuck stoically to the fiction that they were mercenaries acting on behalf of a group of Nigerian businessmen who wanted to return Dikko to face trial. One of Britain’s most eminent and expensive lawyers, George Carmen, QC, had been retained for their defense. In his closing speech he told the court, “Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that the Israeli intelligence service was never far removed from the entire operation.”
The prosecution offered no evidence to implicate Mossad. It was left to the judge to do so in his summing-up. He told the jury, “The finger of involvement almost certainly points to Mossad.”
Barak received a fourteen-year sentence, Dr. Shapiro and Abithol ten years apiece. Yusufu was given twelve years’ imprisonment. All were subsequently released after remission for good conduct and quietly deported to Israel. As it had for others before them who had served Mossad well, the service made sure they would remain out of the limelight and not have to answer such troubling questions as to whether Dr. Shapiro, who had so flagrantly broken his Hippocratic oath, still practiced medicine—and for whom.
Nahum Admoni was told by MI5 that if there was a further lapse, Mossad would be treated as an unfriendly service. By then the Mossad chief was planning yet another operation designed to remind Britain of who the real enemies were—and at the same time gain sympathy for Israel.
CHAPTER 14
THE CHAMBERMAID’S BOMB
On a cloudless morning in February 1986, two Israeli air force fighter aircraft swooped down on a Libyan-registered Learjet flying from Tripoli to Damascus. The civilian plane was in international airspace, thirty thousand feet over the Mediterranean and about to begin its descent into Syrian airspace. On board were delegates returning from a conference of Palestinian and other radical groups that Mu’ammar Gadhafi had convened to discuss new steps to achieve the Libyan leader’s burning obsession to see Israel driven from the face of the earth.
The sight of the fighters taking up stations on either side of the Learjet created near panic among its fourteen passengers, and for good reason. Four months before, on Tuesday, October 1, 1985, Israeli F-15 fighter-bombers had destroyed the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization southeast of Tunis, flying a round-trip of almost three thousand miles, which had involved air-to-air refueling and the kind of precise intelligence that always sent a collective shiver throughout the Arab world.
That raid was a direct response to the murder by PLO gunmen of three middle-aged Israeli tourists as they sat aboard their yacht in the Cypriot port of Larnaca only days before, basking in the sunshine of late summer. The killings had occurred on Yom Kippur and, for many Israelis, the slaughter rekindled memories of the onset of the war on the Day of Atonement when the nation itself had been caught as unaware as the tourists.
Despite having endured almost four decades of terrorism, the murders caused widespread horror and fear among Israelis: the tourists had been held for some time on board their boat and allowed to write down their final thoughts before they were killed: first to die was the woman, fatally shot in the stomach. Her two male companions were made to throw her overboard. Then one after another, they were shot at point-blank range in the back of the head.
In the black propaganda war that had long been a feature of the intelligence war between the PLO and Israel, the former claimed that the three victims were Mossad agents on a mission. So well did the PLO plant the story that several European newspapers identified the woman as one of the agents caught in the Lillehammer affair in 1973. That woman was still alive and had long given up her Mossad activities.
Since then the Arab press had been full of dire warnings that Israel would retaliate. Many of the stories had been planted by Mossad’s psychological warfare department to fray still further the nerves of millions of Arabs.
The passengers in the Learjet, who only a few hours before had chanted for the destruction of Israel at the Libyan conference, saw the grim faces of their enemy peering at them. One of the fighters waggled its wings, the follow-me signal recognized the world over by pilots. To reinforce the message, an Israeli pointed a gloved hand straight ahead and then downward toward Galilee. The women on board the jet began to wail; some of the men started to pray. Others stared ahead fatalistically. They all knew this had always been a possibility; the accursed infidels had the capability to reach out and snatch them from the sky.
One of the Israeli aircraft fired a short warning burst from its cannon, warning the Learjet’s captain not to contemplate radioing for help from the Syrian air force—only minutes’ flying time away. The passengers’ fear increased. Were they, too, about to suffer the same fate that had befallen one of the authentic heroes of the Arab world?
Just a month before the Tunis air raid, an Israeli naval patrol boat with Mossad agents on board had stopped a small ship called Opportunity on its regular shuttle between Beirut and Larnaca. From the bilges they had dragged out Faisal Abu Sharah, a terrorist with blood on his hands. He had been bundled on board the patrol boat, the prelude to ruthless interrogation in Israel, followed by a quick trial and a long term in jail. The swiftness and audacity of the operation had yet again enhanced the image of invincibility Israel presented to the Arab world.
Such incidents were not uncommon. Working closely with Israel’s small but highly trained navy, Mossad had since then intercepted several boats and removed passengers suspected of terrorist activities. Not only Israel’s long Mediterranean coast called for vigilance; the Red Sea also presented a constant vulnerability. A Mossad agent in Yemen had been the source for an operation that had thwarted a PLO plot to sail a fishing boat up the Red Sea to the Israeli resort of Elat and detonate its cargo of explosives close to the shore, lined with hotels. An Israeli gunboat had intercepted the fishing boat and overpowered its two suicide bombers before they could detonate the cargo.
As the Learjet descended toward northern Israel, the passengers also feared this was a further retaliation for what had happened when another of their heroes, Abu Al-Abbas, had, only a few months before, on October 2, 1985, taken over the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in what was the most spectacular act of maritime piracy the world could recall. Al-Abbas had murdered one of the passengers, Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew in a wheelchair, by throwing
him into the sea.
The crime had become a floating diplomatic incident that had embroiled an outraged Israel and the United States, Egypt, Italy, Syria, Cyprus, Tunisia, and the stateless PLO; for days the crisis had drifted around the Mediterranean, gathering publicity for the hijackers and revealing the self-interest which, in the Middle East, governed attitudes toward terrorism. The hijacking of a cruise liner that was bringing much-needed foreign tourists and hard currency to Israel, followed by the murder of a passenger, provoked a wave of indecision. The murder had technically taken place on Italian soil, the Genova-registered Achille Lauro. But Italy was highly vulnerable to terrorism and wished to see a quiet end to the incident. The United States wanted justice for its murdered citizen. Across the nation appeared stickers proclaiming, “Don’t get mad, get even.” Finally the hijackers, having held the world’s headlines for several days, surrendered to the Egyptian authorities, who then allowed them to leave the country—to the fury of Israel.
More than one of the Learjet’s passengers wondered whether they would now be held in some Israeli jail in an act of revenge. With the fighters still flying almost wingtip to wingtip, the executive jet landed at a military airfield in northern Galilee. A waiting team of Aman interrogators had been told by Mossad that on board were two of the most wanted terrorists in the world, the notorious Abu Nidal and the equally infamous Ahmed Jibril. Instead the interrogators found themselves questioning a bunch of badly frightened Arabs, none of whose names appeared on Israel’s computers. The Learjet was allowed to depart with its passengers.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 31